The present invention relates to a cylinder head sealing arrangement for reciprocating piston engines, especially internal combustion engines, and advantageously engines having cylinder liners. The end of each liner that faces a cylinder head is provided with a raised collar that includes centering means. A preferably metallic combustion chamber seal in the form of a ring having a constant thickness in a starting position is guided with clearance fit. When the cylinder head screws are tightened, this ring undergoes a plastic deformation of a first and/or second end face. A seal for the remainder of the surface is provided for delimiting the plastic deformation.
Sealing the cylinder heads of supercharged internal combustion engines, with the thereby resulting high pressure forces upon the cylinder heads, is increasingly problematic. To resolve this problem, it has been proposed to deform the cylinder head seal plastically beyond the flow or Yield limit of the material. In this region, the loading force (sealing force) that is transmitted from the cylinder head screws to the cylinder head seal is largely independent of variations in dimension and is prescribed solely by the strength of the material. In this way, the fraction of the screw force that is introduced into the cylinder head seal is clearly defined. Unfortunately, offsetting these advantages are problems with respect to centering of the sealing ring, since on the one hand a small tolerance of the radial play leads to obstruction of the plastic deformation process and when the play is exhausted a so-called hydrostatic state of stress occurs, and on the other hand if the radial play is too great this leads, due to displacement or shifting of the ring, to a stressing of the ring that is no longer radially symmetrical and hence leads to an undesired variation of the sealing force upon the end faces of the seal (U.S. Pat. No. 5,010,853, Heribert Kubis et al).
It is an object of the present invention to improve a cylinder head sealing arrangement of the aforementioned general type in such a way that the centering is ensured without destroying the plastic deformation.